Held to answer

Nobody is flying over the cuckoo’s nest in Portland. Especially the police, who are caught between two special-needs groups.

On one side is Portland’s homeless population, many of whom are mentally ill or on drugs.

On the other side are the Portlanders who seek to be the envy of the rest of the world (or at least America), and who don’t want to deal with crazy people unless they’re the kind who have a book deal. Let somebody else deal with the untalented strays.

According to the U.S. Dept. of Justice, Oregon has one of the largest homeless populations in the U. S., and many of those homeless are concentrated in Portland. It’s a key piece of information mentioned in passing in a 42-page report by the DOJ investigating Portland police officers’ use of excessive force on the mentally ill.

In the last three years, 10 persons with mental illness have died during encounters with Portland police. How did one of the bluest cities in one of bluest states end up with a police department that is supposedly so brutal?

City officials were still chewing over the DOJ’s report this past weekend as Portland prepared to inaugurate a new portion of its streetcar. At a cost of $148 million, city officials were anxious about how receptive the public would be: “They’ve built it, now who will come?” The Oregonian asked.

Perhaps Portland leaders should be asking, what reputation has the city built over the years that has attracted so many homeless and mentally ill? And why do they keep coming if the police are so vicious?

The DOJ report, signed by Oregon’s U.S. Attorney Amanda Marshall and Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, offered police critics more reasons to hate cops.

The report lacks historical background, allowing politicians – and cop haters – to avoid addressing the real problem. We have mentally ill people on our streets with nowhere to go, and we can thank well-intentioned Democrats, Republicans, the ACLU and mental health experts.

It wasn’t the police who passed laws like the Community Mental Health Act, signed into law by President Kennedy (D). It was designed to help deinstitutionalize the mentally ill and move them into more humane, community-based programs.

The police had nothing to do with the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act passed in 1967 by a bipartisan California legislature, signed by then-Gov. Ronald Reagan (R) and enacted under Gov. Jerry Brown (D). This law also helped free the mentally ill from institutions, releasing them into communities where, presumably through a combination of drugs and services, they would be able to live better lives.

A few years later, the patient’s rights movement took off, with mental health advocates and civil rights organizations like the ACLU pushing for liberation of the mentally ill.

It was all well-meaning. State mental institutions had been exposed as hideous places. In one classic example, the 1966 documentary “Titicut Follies” by Frederick Wiseman, there was an unforgettable scene: A naked man lies on a table, being force fed with a tube down his throat, and an attendant pours thick liquid into a funnel attached to the tube. The attendant’s cigarette hangs out of his mouth and over the funnel, the ash growing ever longer, ready to plop into the liquid.

No decent person would want to return our mentally ill to institutions like that. But we cannot expect police to fix this problem for the rest of us.

“The police are not meant to be street-corner psychologists,” says Dr. Linda A. Teplin of Northwestern University in a story in the Daily Beast that is also a reminder that the mentally ill can be dangerous – even to an armed cop: Chicago policeman Richard Francis, a 27-year veteran, responded to a call an emotionally disturbed woman who had been fighting with a city bus passenger. Before the officer could calm the woman, she grabbed his gun and shot him dead.

As far back as 1984 – 28 years ago! – the errors of releasing the mentally ill from hospitals and into the community were known. An analysis in the New York Times detailed the regrets of many influential people who had been involved it what they later acknowledged was a major failure.

“The picture is one of cost-conscious policy makers, who were quick to buy optimistic projections that were, in some instances, buttressed by misinformation and by a willingness to suspend skepticism. … (H)eavy responsibility lay on a sometimes neglected aspect of the problem: the over-reliance on drugs to do the work of society.”

Charles Schlaifer, a member of the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health, a group established by Congress that helped form the new policies toward the mentally ill, told the Times he was disgusted with the advice presented by leading psychiatrists of that day.

“Tranquilizers became the panacea for the mentally ill,” he said. ‘”The state programs were buying them by the carload, sending the drugged patients back to the community and the psychiatrists never tried to stop this. Local mental health centers were going to be the greatest thing going, but no one wanted to think it through.”

They are still not thinking it through. The DOJ report actually states, “We are confident that the state-wide implementation of an improved holistic, effective, community-based mental health infrastructure will be of enormous benefit to law enforcement agencies across the state, as well as to people with mental illness.”

Unless some of those infrastructures support secure institutions, that confidence is misplaced.

Most of the recommended measures are not likely to aid either the mentally ill or the police. One suggestion that might help is creating crisis intervention teams comprised of officers who have the temperament and desire to work with the mentally ill.

Although it is not on the list of measures, Portland police should stop investigating officer-involved deaths in-house and consent to outside review by another law enforcement agency. As it is now, in-house investigations have no credibility with even sympathetic members of the public.

The DOJ’s report could bring unintended consequences. Officers may pull back when responding to calls involving the mentally ill. They may be on guard for legitimate criminals using the publicity surrounding the DOJ to fake mental illness as a way to get an advantage. However, officers will be more careful about their language.

“We also received comment from the advocacy community that they were offended by (Portland Police Bureau’s) pejorative reference to people with mental illness as ‘mentals.’ … We recommend that PPB immediately stop using this term.”

“Mental” will become the new n-word, and any instance of its usage will be dutifully publicized and commented on at length. This is how it’s possible to go through the motions of appearing to address a problem when really nothing has changed.

This past weekend, in addition to the new streetcar line, Portland also celebrated Feast, what it hopes will become a premiere annual event for America’s food-obsessed. (A weekend pass to all the festivities cost $650.)

While the city was showing off its quirky charms, imagine what would have happened had a James Chasse wandered into Feast and pissed in David Sarasohn’s hot chocolate.

Or imagine what would have happened had an Aaron Emanuel Ferguson, spitting and swinging his fists, bounded onto one of the streetcars filled with families enjoying a beautiful fall weekend.

Most likely police would have been called to deal with it.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

The Crisis Next Door